


The Devil At The Crossroads

by blacklaces



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: African-American Folklore, American South, Angst, Crossroads, Deal with a Devil, Mentioned: Racism, Mentioned: War, Merrick is the Devil in this Metaphor, Multi, POV Nile Freeman, Post-Lab but Pre-Exile, Religion, The devil's in the details, blues music, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25657609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacklaces/pseuds/blacklaces
Summary: They say he went to the crossroads and got down on his knees and handed up his guitar to the Devil. They say the Devil appeared and tuned the guitar himself, and before he gave the guitar back, the Devil said,“Once you receive the guitar, your soul is mine. Do you still want it?”“And Johnson took the guitar and left the crossroads. Few nights later, he shows up at a blues joint in Greenwood, Mississippi, and he starts playing like no one had ever heard before. That’s how he sold his soul to the Devil.”Booker takes a long drink from the bottle, fingers tightly clasped around its neck."But the thing is Booker,” Nile continues, “If you make a deal with the Devil, you gotta pay the price."OrNile and Booker in London
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 12
Kudos: 169





	The Devil At The Crossroads

The London safehouse is quiet. Apparently it’s a place the four of them set up in the 80’s, and it looks like it. Though sparse, most of the furniture and decorations in the rooms remind Nile of her mother’s old pictures from when she was in her twenties in Chicago. It’s in a more rundown neighborhood, Nile able to see the visible decline from Merrick’s High Street building to where they are now.

(And man, that is one car ride Nile never wants to replicate. Talk about awkward. Her, Andy, and Booker squished in the back, with Nile in the middle, and Joe and Nickey upfront. Probably a good idea though, she can’t imagine either her or Andy driving, and any configuration that put Booker and Joe next to each other was going to explode like a volcano at a middle school science fair.) 

Nile’s sitting on the couch, TV off, lacking anything better to do. Joe and Nicky are ensconced together in their room at the end of the hall, emphatically removed from the rest. Andy’s at the table, unmoving, staring into her glass, emphatically not looking at anyone. Booker’s out on the balcony, also emphatically not looking at anyone. Nile’s clocking all of them, looking at Andy and Booker from time to time, and straining her ears to her soft voices from Joe and Nicky’s room.

Nile doesn’t want to knock on Joe and Nicky’s door. Together, they’re- a lot. On the cramped drive to the safe house, Nile could see their emotions fray, the two slowly becoming more and more on edge even as they got further away from Merrick’s lab. She doesn’t want to sit with ( _disturb_ ) Andy either. The woman is going through something Nile can’t even come close to understanding, and had stalked off to the kitchen and poured herself a drink the moment they stepped into the safe house; she hadn’t even gotten up to take a shower. So, Andy’s out, Joe- and by extension Nicky- is out, but Nile doesn’t want to be alone.

She looks out through the sliding glass door that separates the living area with the balcony. Booker probably doesn’t want to be alone right now either, even if he thinks he deserves it. Mind made up she opens the door and steps out into the London night. Booker doesn’t look at her when she sits down in the chair next to him, keeping his eyes focused on the city lights below them. Nile doesn’t really know what to say. This whole week has been crazy in a way that Nike didn’t even know was possible.

He’s guilty. He knows it, Nile knows it, they all do. But Nile also understands some of Booker’s own pain and reasons (she can understand most of everyone’s pain, but of course, theirs has been amplified by the centuries they’ve spent together, centuries that Nile can’t even begin to comprehend). Nile thinks she understands- why he made this deal, why he took the terms given. He might have been willfully ignoring the possibilities, but he didn’t know that Andy would be mortal, that they would treat Joe and Nicky as they had. Booker did bad things for what he believed to be the right reasons- all motivated by his own desire to die, the ramifications of, frankly, what seems to have been a pretty shitty life.

Nile can only extrapolate from what she knows. From the pain in his voice when he told her about his family; he could barely keep his composure. So young, compared to the others, but exposed to so much violence and suffering, somewhat unwillingly. From seeing his home more at war than not, to every other fight that he was involved in, trying to make peace when he couldn’t find his own. 

The silence is suffocating. 

“There’s a story-“ she starts, then stops. Booker doesn’t acknowledge her voice, continuing to stare out at the city lights.

“There’s a story” she starts again, “A myth and a legend. There was a man who had a hard life, Johnson was his name. As a boy he moved from house to house, always on the move in Mississippi. And Mississippi, in the early 1910s and 20s, was a hard place to be Black. His only solace and his only escape from working in the fields was playing the Blues on his old guitar. 

Nile searches far into the reaches of her memory, slowly pulling the rest of the story to the forefront of her mind. Her grandma was from the rural South, something that set her apart from Nile’s other Chicago-born grandparents. 

“But when he was eighteen he met a girl. He fell in love, they got married, and she became pregnant. The man gave up his music to be with her- this was when Blues was still considered the Devil’s music, and the girl’s family was religious. He was a good player; good, but average, and he loved the blues more than the blues loved him back, so he gave it up to be with her. He found work as a field hand on a farm near her family’s. It was hard work- and the terms of sharecroppin’ meant the white owners of the plantation kept most of the money. But, it was peaceful, as much as it could be. Eight and a half months later, the woman’s dead and the baby buried with her. Her family told him it was divine punishment for playing the Devil’s music. It all happened before he could even catch his breath. ”

Nile takes a deep breath of her own.

“Wife dead and baby gone with her, music was the only thing the man had left. But it wasn’t enough. After the funeral, the man from the Delta disappeared for a year, only his guitar and a few clothes missing from his things. The man had wanted the pain to go away-he wanted to be happy, to get what he wanted. They say that one night during the year he disappeared, the man from the delta, went down to the crossroads. When he came back, everyone said he was the best guitarist in the world, that he could play better than anyone else around. 

“Nile-“ Booker interjects, still _not_ _looking_ at her.

“No.” She says. “Just listen.”

“Now Johnson, he went to the crossroads and got down on his knees and handed up his guitar to the Devil. They say the Devil appeared and tuned the guitar himself, and before he gave the guitar back, the Devil said,

“ _Once you receive the guitar, your soul is mine._

_Do you still want it?”_

“And Johnson took the guitar and left the crossroads. Few nights later, he shows up at a blues joint in Greenwood, Mississippi, and he starts playing like no one had ever heard before. That’s how he sold his soul to the Devil.”

Booker takes a long drink from the bottle, fingers tightly clasped around its neck.

“But the thing is Booker,” Nile continues, “If you make a deal with the Devil, you gotta pay the price. Johnson’s life was one tragedy built on top of another. There was no end for him. Johnson was the best Blues player in the world, but he was always angry, always chasing the next high. Angry at the world, sure. He was a Black man in America- he had a reason. But he was angry at everyone, including himself. He was poisoned by his lover's husband when he was twenty-seven and spent three days in agony before he died. They said he howled like a wolf, like the hounds of Hell were at his heels.”

Nile’s hands are shaking as she finishes the story.

“Honestly Booker, that story scares the shit out of me. Of everything my grandma ever told me, there was something about it that made it one of the worst. The very idea that the Devil could take your soul, that it was something that could be sold-.”

She looks up from her hands and over at Booker.

“The Devil promised him something at those crossroads and paid his price. Do you think he got a fair deal?”

Booker moves in his seat, finally looking at Nile for the first time that night.

“He got what he wanted, didn’t he?” His voice is gruff, words ever so slightly slurred from the bottle that’s held tightly in his hands. Nile absently wonders how much force it would take for the glass to break.

“But you didn’t. Do you still think it’s fair to pay the full amount?”

Booker stares at her in shock. Nile starts to get up and walks to the door. She doesn’t want to be alone, but she’ll give Booker space to ruminate over his own failed deal with the Devil, though Merrick certainly pales in comparison to the figure from her faith. With her hand on the handle, she turns to him. Justice means he has to make amends, accept whatever inevitable punishment that Andy, Joe, and Nicky hand down, but it doesn’t mean it has to be his end with them.

“Don’t resign yourself to the worst case scenario just yet.”

Nile’s been here for less than a week, but she’ll be damned if she loses any one of her new found family members.

**Author's Note:**

> The story of a blues singer who sold his soul at the crossroads is a very popular piece of folklore in the American South. The legend is based on a real man, Robert Johnson, who disappeared for a year and came back the best blues player in the world. Robert Johnson is considered the greatest blues singer in history, despite recording just 29 songs. He is the direct inspiration for many famous musicians from the 1940s to now, including those who would create the modern blues sound and rock'n'roll.  
> Headcannonn for this piece is that Nile's grandmother is from the American South, and that Booker, besides depression, has a severe case of PTSD.  
> While there are many different versions of this story, this is the one I’m most familiar with. 
> 
> As always, find me on tumblr at [Blacklaces](https://blacklaces.tumblr.com/)


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